Creating a Third Space as a Means of Resistance: Joan Gili and The Dolphin Book Company

Summary

Conflicts and wars oftentimes leave individuals with three options: they can either flee their countries in search of a better life, stay and live an “inner exile”, or assimilate conflicting beliefs. Those who physically abandon their countries of origin, carry with themselves their culture and traditions. Thus, it is obvious that conflict and cultural transmission are two concepts that are interrelated. Homi K. Bhabha in his book The Location of Culture focuses on this point and challenges the idea of “purity” of cultures referring to the concept of “Third Space”. He defended this space as a place where “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity” (1994, 37).

This is exactly what Joan Gili created in London as soon as he landed in Great Britain. Joan Gili i Serra (1907-1998) was a Barcelonan scholar, translator and bookseller who fixed his residence in Great Britain in 1934. Even though he left Spain two years before the onset of the Spanish Civil War (1936¬–1939), his bookstore and then publishing house, The Dolphin Book Company (1935–1996), became one of the centers for protection of exiles in need. He assisted them in two different ways, either by publishing, in English translation, books banned in Spain by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), or by giving exiles physical shelter in his house or his bookstore, despite the threats posed by the Spanish embassy to prevent him from assisting refugees (Michael 1998, 18-19). Although Gili’s role has remained unnoticed throughout history, I argue that there is a strong relationship between the concept of third space defined by Homi K. Bhabha and the task of Joan Gili.

In this paper, my aim is to analyze Gili’s means of resistance through publishing and bookselling through a theoretical framework based on Colonial Studies and the concept of resistance as an opposition to power and politics, guided by the theories of Michael Foucault (Toplišek 2019, 129). In the investigation, I focus on Gili’s task as an introducer, through translation, of well-acclaimed Spanish and Catalan-language originals that were banned in by the regime of Franco in Spain at that time. Some examples are Federico García Lorca’s first anthology in English language in 1939 or works by Salvador Espriu or Carles Riba. My main aim is to shed light on the task of Gili through the lens of an innovative approach, to contribute to the scholarship on resistance against Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and abroad.